Episode Details

It's time to take a look at what's happening around Wyoming, for Friday, November 15th. I'm Wendy Corr, bringing you headlines from the Cowboy State Daily newsroom - brought to you by the Cowboy State Daily Morning Show with Jake. From 6 a.m. to 10 a.m., Monday through Friday, Cowboy State Daily's Jake Nichols takes you deeper into the stories that matter - and keeps up with the news, weather and sports in your part of Wyoming. Just tune into Cowboy State Daily Dot Com and join the conversation.

Engineers say there's no choice but to breach the failing, 115-year-old LaPrele Dam near Douglas. But farmers who rely on the dam for irrigation and runoff control say that leaves them with no good options.

Breaching the dam could leave downstream landowners wide open to catastrophic spring runoff, according to Cowboy State Daily's Mark Heinz.

"There's a lot of people downstream from that that rely on that for agricultural irrigation and other water uses. And of course, they're not particularly thrilled to see that dam go, because that puts them in a really tough position, not only for the fact that they could be losing their irrigation water for up to five years, but also because that dam is really important to controlling spring runoff and the floods that they can get from that."

The 130-foot-high dam was built in 1909 and was originally intended to have a 50-year lifespan.

Read the full story HERE.

Usually when there's a feud in politics, a long backstory is involved as to what started it all.

Appearing on Cowboy State Daily's Morning Show With Jake on Thursday, Secretary of State Chuck Gray said his ongoing feud with Gov. Mark Gordon isn't personal, but about policy. Cowboy State Daily's Leo Wolfson reports that the animosity stems from a bill that Gray proposed while in the Wyoming Legislature that garnered one of Gordon's first vetoes while in office.

"It all kind of stems back to a veto Gordon made of Gray's bill… in 2019 that would have allowed the state to have money dedicated to funding an effort the state of Washington made to not open a coal export terminal that Wyoming was going to use. This would have been really critical for Wyoming to export its coal out of the country… Gordon did make some efforts addressing this, but people like Gray have said that those efforts were too little and too late."

Gray also sparred with Gordon earlier this year on tighter voter residency rules. And on Thursday, Gray criticized Gordon's negotiating skills, saying the governor lacks toughness and timing.

Read the full story HERE.

A proposed 2,010-acre solar farm and battery storage facility on private ranch land has a green light from the Natrona County Planning Commission.

EG Haystack Solar LLC, a subsidiary of Enfinity Global, plans to build a 199-megawatt utility-scale solar power generation system along with 100 MW of battery storage on site. Cowboy State Daily's Dale Killingbeck reports that at the commission meeting this week, two people spoke in favor of the plan, while several residents spoke against it.

"People that are going to live around the proposed area are concerned about the view… And another big concern that residents had was fire… and there was also environmental concerns… the people that are proposing a project said it's going to be made, basically, a lot of it's going to be silicone and or silica, basically sand, it sounds like glass is the most, the majority of it."